Frequent standing and sitting could be the easiest weight-loss trick ever

By Sam Downing| 2 years ago

And stand... and sit... and stand... and sit...

This news might have you and your co-workers bobbing up and down at your desks like meerkats.

This news might have you and your co-workers bobbing up and down at your desks like meerkats: frequent standing and sitting could help you drop more than 2kg in a month — even if you don’t do anything else.

Researchers from the University of Glasgow recruited 10 overweight men to participate in three trials (where “trial” just means “experiment”, and not some brutal Hunger Games-esque test of survival). Each trial lasted eight hours, and the men had their blood levels and various metabolic factors measured throughout, in addition to being fed breakfast and lunch.

In one trial, dubbed the SIT trial, the fellas just sat around all day reading, watching TV and occupying themselves with busywork, only getting up to use the bathroom.

In another trial, dubbed the PRO-Stand trial, the participants sat for 15 minutes then stood still for 15 minutes, then repeated that pattern over the course of the day — effectively doing 16 (very slow) bodyweight squats over the eight hours.

And in a third trial, dubbed the INT-Stand trial, the men basically stood up for 90 seconds, then sat down for the next 30 seconds (with short sitting breaks every half an hour) — equating to 160 glacially paced bodyweight squats over the course of the trial, which the researchers said is equal to “a session of resistance exercise spread over a number of hours”.

The verdict? In PRO-Stand trial, the participants burned about 10 percent more calories than in the SIT trial, and in the INT-Stand, they burned around 20 percent more — likely due to the increased energy needed for the muscular contractions of those sloth-like squats.

The research team calculated that, if you repeated the INT-Stand protocol for four weeks, you could drop 2.2kg — a pretty significant amount to lose just from standing up and sitting down more.

If you don’t think that constant standing and sitting sounds like a realistic strategy, the researchers agree with you: “our INT-Stand protocol, with 20 sit-to-stand transition cycles per hour, is clearly impractical to implement in ‘real-world’ settings,” they wrote in the study.

But they say their finding — reportedly the first of its kind — illustrates that there are simple ways to encourage people to become less sedentary.

“For example, performing four sit-to-stand transition cycles per hour (that is, standing then sitting once every 15 minutes) over the course of the waking day would lead to approximately 100–120kJ of additional daily energy expenditure,” they said.

Note that turning into a meerkat at work is no excuse to ditch standard exercise: The study indicated there’s no evidence that more frequent standing improves metabolic functioning in the same way that a brisk walk or an intense gym session will — “suggesting that it may be necessary to break up sitting with activities of greater intensity than quiet standing”.